MIT Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35” Asia 2018

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MIT Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35” Asia 2018

NUS ECE Department’s faculty, Dr Feng Jiashi has been listed as one of the ten young outstanding innovators from the Asia Pacific region (Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan) on the MIT Technology Review’s “Innovators Under 35” Asia 2018 list.

Dr Feng will automatically become a candidate and potential finalist for the global “Innovators Under 35” list celebrated in the fall of 2018 in Boston, USA. He will deliver a three-minute presentation at EmTach Asia in Singapore on 30-31 January 2018.

As a young innovator, Dr Feng is honoured as a trailblazer in his field of research and in leading the next generation of technological breakthroughs. His work focuses on machine learning/deep learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence. His dynamic neural networks enable computers and robots to grow learning ability in sensing and understanding visual world gradually.

In particular, he developed the technique for building an artificial neural network with brain-alike plasticity. This technique models the process of human brain development that produces a number of new neural connections upon learning new knowledge. With this technique developed by Dr. Feng, the network architecture can evolve along with receiving new knowledge about the environment in a proper way -- the neural network will grow its size and complexity smoothly to a more sophisticated one to learn, master and integrate new knowledge. The technique develops neural networks by identifying and pruning redundant neurons and connections within them to enhance their compactness, and meanwhile it introduces new neurons and establishes new connections to store new knowledge. In practice, such technique helps deep learning practitioners get rid of the tedious work of handcrafting network architectures for different applications. The model has been applied for object recognition and fine-grained image understanding.